Herons

I was back in Illinois this past weekend and took a bit of time to walk down to the local heron rookery.  One year I counted around 120 nests in this location – on Friday there were fewer but I counted at least 50 active nests.  I didn’t sketch on Friday but here is a sketch from last month when I saw my first northeastern Ohio great blue heron of 2012.  

Ransacked by a Rafter of Turkeys

Last week on February 27th I noticed that almost all of the skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) in the fen had been ransacked by a rafter of wild turkeys. In all cases the tops of the cabbage flowers were simply ripped off or ripped open but all parts and pieces appeared to be present – the turkeys were not eating the skunk cabbage – so what were they up to?

It is well documented that the inside of a skunk cabbage flower is stinky and can be as much as 36 degrees warmer than the outside temperature, often melting the snow around it. The temperature difference creates a nice toasty sauna-like atmosphere for potential pollinators. I imagine a bunch of early emerging insects crowding in to the warm and stinky skunk cabbage saloon to get a bite to eat and stay dry on cold February and March nights not realizing that the local turkeys know right where they are. Tired of a winter diet of nuts and soft body insects the turkeys probably have a hankering for something warm and crunchy.

I can’t find anything online about turkey destroying skunk cabbage in search of insects, but I have to think that is what they are up to – I hope it is not just a bunch of young Jakes being teenagers.

Leaf Scars of Mockernut Hickory

One thing that I find interesting about winter twigs are leaf scars; in some species they are incredibly consistant while in others such as mockernut hickory (Carya abla) they are extrememly variable.  Here I illustrated 3 lateral buds and their associated leaf scars as well as outlines showing the variety of shapes of leaf scars that were on this one twig.

Alternate Leaf Dogwood in Winter

Alternate-leaf dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) is a less than common native shrub or small tree in this area of Ohio.  I see C.alternifolia in both floodplains and along headwater streams and 9 times out of 10 my first impression is that it is a young sassafras tree.  On older twigs it can be hard to see that the leaf scars are alternate - they appear bunched even whorled sometimes however if you find a young fast growing twig it is clear that the tree is alternate.  You will almost always notice that one of the lower branches will be dead or will have dead twigs - they will stand out as a bright orange branch.



young twig

 


old twig and dead twig

 

Two Common Invasive Species

Unfortunately there are a bunch of non-native invasive plant species that are impacting our natural areas – two of the more common ones are garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) and glossy buckthorn (Frangula alnus).  I recently gave a talk about invasives management at the Ohio Invasive Plant Council Annual Meeting – here are a few pages from my notebook that I scanned for the presentation and the take home message for each.

This is a sketch of garlic mustard that has been cut off near the ground and left in the woods (a technique that is approved for management of large nasty monocultures of garlic mustard).  I think of this as a reduction not a control – the cut plants will often times have enough stored energy to re-flower and produce seed.  Similarly the cut stalks have enough energy to mature the young seed pods (seliques) and produce seed.  Take home message is that it is always best to pull these plants by their roods and get them out of your woods!

This watercolor sketch is of glossy buckthorn in a wetland – once these things grow too large to hand-pull the best management becomes cut and treat (with herbicide).  I tried to illustrate that once the plant is cut only a small window (5 minutes or so) exists in which an herbicide treatment is effective.  Oftentimes people call and want to know how to kill buckthorn and/or other woody invasive species on their own property – the vast majority of them are doing everything right except that they are treating with herbicide beyond the 5 minute window.

Sketching in Nature

Earlier in the week Kate from the Sketching in Nature blog invited me to become one of their “correspondents” – I was very excited and gladly accepted the invitation. The Sketching in Nature group is composed of nature artists and sketchers from all over the world – it is a great place to spend some time looking at natural history from around the globe and you can start right here.

If you came from Sketching in Nature - thanks for visiting, but you have already seen this and can skip to the next post.

Here is a page from my notebook from earlier in the week - a little look at some of the botanical activity where I stopped for lunch on Tuesday. Lunch was adjacent to a slip above the East Branch of the Chagrin River and the first thing to catch my eye were the undersides of hundreds of round-leaved ragwort (Packera obovata), a brilliant violet anytime of year but especially striking in February. Next I noticed some young sedges their exposed roots barely clinging to the eroding slope. Carex (sedges) is a difficult genus to master, but in this part of the world there are only a few sedges with leaves this wide and the pale bases of the leaves give this one away as C. platyphylla. Much more common here, and abundant to my right on the wooded hillside, is C. plantaginea it is given away by the red/maroon bases of leaves.  By the way, C. plantaginea has some very striking flowers for a sedge - check them out in the top right corner of this journal post. And making their 2012 debut all over the hillside is wild leak aka ramps (Allium tricoccum) a solid two weeks ahead of schedule based on my notes. As always a great day to be in the woods!

Beech Roots

American beech (Fagus grandifolia) has a relatively shallow root system and often has quite a bit of exposed roots especially on the down slope sides of the tree.  I ran into this gnarly fellow the other day while surveying some property lines at work – with no time to sketch I snapped a smart phone picture for later.  The sketch is done with a Sharpie Pen and then washed with a little watercolor.  The only green on the hillside came from Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) so I threw one in.

 



Dark-eyed junco

A dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis) in winterberry (Ilex verticillata).  Polychromos Colored Pencil on Bristol Board.

Charley Harper

One of my favorite artists of all time is Charley Harper – his style was incredibly simple and clean while at the same time impressively precise at portraying birds and wildlife accurately. The famous quote by Charley Harper is “I don’t count the feathers in the wings; I just count the number of wings”. He might not have counted feathers, but he obviously paid close attention to detail. His bird depictions were good enough to now represent one of the most famous bird institutions in the World. If you are familiar with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology their relatively new logo depicts one of Charley’s birds, a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

When my wife and I first started talking about how we were going to decorate our nursery she showed me a picture of a nursery wall mural she liked. The design she showed me was of a tree painted in white on a number of pink canvases that were then fitted together like a puzzle on the wall. I agreed to attempt such a project as long as I could make use of the theme “Eastern Deciduous Forest” – she agreed. From the start I knew that I wanted to attempt this project in the style of Charley Harper.

I started by going to the art store and noting all of the different sizes of pre-stretched canvases that they had and then I made a bunch of note cards to scale and measured my son’s room to determine how much space I had to work with. I laid out a bunch of options and quickly picked one that included 10 different canvases. At this point I was excited about the start of the project and did not think about how long it was going to take. I bought my first canvas primed it with the paint we used to paint the room and started at the bottom.

Once the bottom was done I jumped to the top only because I was excited to do the great blue heron – the fawn at the base of the tree and the heron at the top are still my favorite two pieces of the project.

Next I bought all of the rest of the canvases, painted them blue and then put all of them on the wall so I could sketch the tree on the rest of the pieces.

Then one by one I painted them. I left a blue “frame” around each one because I knew I would never get the tree lines perfectly lined up and wanted to set each apart from each other. I started this project in March before my son was born – he was born in July and I finished in February – so it took almost a year to complete.

After attempting to recreate Charley Harper’s style and even more or less copy some of his birds onto my tree – I don’t know how he did it. As hard as I tried I could not get as clean of lines as he did. His work is amazing! He was an incredible artist and I will not attempt another project like this any time soon. Here is my tribute to Charley Harper.

Hackberry

Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) - Colored pencil - Prints Available.